Trending AI Content on YouTube

We employed several versions of the trending videos dataset to address different aspects of our analysis. The Raw dataset comprises over 1.13 million records, encompassing all trending videos across various regions and categories. From this, we generated the DeduplicatedAcrossDaysOnly dataset, which preserves regional duplicates but removes instances of the same video appearing on multiple days, resulting in approximately 413,000 entries. This version supports analyses of audience exposure while maintaining information about cross-regional visibility.

For production-oriented analyses, we created the CompletelyUnique dataset, which excludes all duplicates by Video ID, resulting in approximately 138,000 videos, each linked to a single country of origin to ensure accurate regional attribution. Finally, we derived a Sampled dataset of 11,304 videos from the Completely Unique set to enable balanced comparisons between AI and non-AI videos, with stratified representation across both regions and categories. The Recommendations dataset contains videos that appear in YouTube’s recommendation panels, allowing for the investigation of exposure and algorithmic propagation patterns.